Colour tattoo of three stars in purple, pink and teal with black swirling lines across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coloured stars and swirls on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A tattoo of a large purple star with two smaller stars in pink and teal, linked by thin black swirls and a curved trailing line. The star outlines are bold and black, with soft purple and pink shading around the fills. The design runs vertically down the centre of the upper back against plain skin.

Back Star Swirl Scroll Line

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, the kettle's not boiled yet, so I'll talk while it makes up its mind. There were three sisters who kept the lamp at the top of Corra hill, and the youngest, Ishbel, could never sleep for the sky. She'd sit at the window with her chin on her knuckles, counting the lights out past the skerries like a woman counting spoons.

Keep reading

One February night the big star slipped its rope. It came down over the hill in a long purple smear, shedding sparks like a torn lantern, and two smaller stars came tumbling after it, one the pink of a fishwife's shawl, one the blue-green of sea glass. They fell into the kelp at Sgeir Dubh, the black rock where nobody rows if they value their boat. The men of the township went out in the morning and found them tangled and cold, still glowing under the weed.

Ishbel wrapped the big one in her apron and carried it home up the hill, and the thin black tail it had trailed behind it curled off across the heather and the cliffs like the scroll of a fiddle, a question nobody had asked yet. Every swirl was a road the stars wanted to take back. For nine nights she carried them up to the lamp room, and each night they grew a little heavier in her arms, as if the sky were pulling them home by the hair.

On the tenth night she set them down on the gallery rail and took her hands away. Nobody saw them go. When the cloud cleared, the three lights were back where they belonged, and the curl of their old trail still hung above the hill, writing its slow way up. If you climb Corra on a clear night, you'll see it yet. Ishbel's still at the window, of course, counting.